“Inhabit” is a documentary film project that aims to expand the reach and relatability of permaculture. Permaculture is a design science based on the observation and replication of patterns and relationships found in nature; it is an approach to designing sustainable systems of agriculture, community, economics, politics, and more.

We will travel in a solar and veggie-oil-powered bus documenting the people and projects currently giving voice to permaculture in the Northeast. We will look at permaculture practices in rural, suburban, and urban environments to break away from the conception of it being purely agricultural, and we will explore the breadth of its application to current local and global challenges - from issues of food, water, and medicine, to governance, economy, and culture.

Ben Falk

Benis the author of The Resilient Farm and Homestead. He has studied architecture and landscape architecture at the graduate level and holds a master’s degree in land-use planning and design. He has conducted nearly 200 site development consultations across New England and facilitated dozens of courses on permaculture design, property selection, microclimate design, and design for climate change. He is the founder of Whole Systems Design, and is researching cold climate permaculture farming at his site in Vermont. He is a leading authority on permaculture homesteading. We filmed him at his own homestead.

Lisa Depiano

Lisa is a member of Pedal People in Northampton, MA - a permaculture inspired business that facilitates the bike powered pickup of home compost/trash. She is a certified permaculture designer/teacher and faculty member for the Yestermorrow Design/Build School. She is a co-founder of the Mobile Design Lab, a collective of designers transforming spaces and environmental policies in western, MA. We filmed her at the Mobile Design Lab office and on a bicycle route for Pedal People.

Mark Shepard is the author of the acclaimed Restoration Agriculture, a guide to perennial ecosystem agriculture. He is the CEO of Forest Agriculture Enterprises and runs New Forest Farm, where we filmed, which is a 106-acre perennial agriculture forest that uses oak savanna, successional brush land and eastern woodlands as an ecological model.

Dwaine Lee

Dwaine Lee directs Special Projects in Green Workforce development for the Horticultural Society of New York. Formerly the Field Director of Sustainable South Bronx’s Bronx Environmental Stewards Training, Dwaine holds certifications in Rain Garden Installation and Permaculture Design from Rutgers University. He is a certified NYC citizen tree pruner and a Certified Master Composter through the DSNY compost project. Dwaine has consulted on, designed, and managed green infrastructure and Low Impact Development (LID) projects of varying scopes, from building raised beds for urban farms to installing rain gardens, greenroofs, wildlife habitat corridors and the ecological restoration of urban forests. Additionally, Dwaine has extensive experience in urban gardening, agriculture, bee-keeping and landscaping. Dwaine designed a curriculum to transfer these employable skills that promote local and global sustainability.

Lisa Fernandes

Lisa organizes the 1500+ member Portland Maine Permaculture group and is the Director of its non-profit home, The Resilience Hub. Lisa sits on the board of the Permaculture Institute of the Northeast and on the Grantmaking Committee of the New England Grassroots Environment Fund. She and her family are actively converting their 1/3 acre property into a demonstration site for resilient and abundant "post-carbon" living. We filmed at her property, at a permablitz (an event organized by the Portland Maine Permaculture Group), and at the Resilience Hub.

Eric Toensmeier

Eric has spent twenty years exploring edible and useful plants of the world and their use in perennial agroecosystems. He is the author of Perennial Vegetables and the new Paradise Lot, and he is the co-author of Edible Forest Gardens with Dave Jacke. Eric is a founding Board member of the Apios Institute for Regenerative Perennial Agriculture and recently founded the Bosque Comestible project, an online Spanish-language user-generated database of useful perennials for Mesoamerica and the Caribbean, with an international team. We filmed at his urban garden, which is a model of how to apply permaculture to a small space with poor soils, featuring over 200 useful perennial and self-seeding species on 1/10 of an acre. http://www.perennialsolutions.org

Paula Hewitt

Paula is a painter, illustrator, and builder of green playgrounds. She lectures at School of Visual Arts, The Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Book Festival, Cooper Union, Department of Sanitation, DEP facilities,skate parks + gardens. http://paulaamram.blogspot.com

Andrew Faust

Andrew lived off the grid in West Virginia for 8 years where he designed and built a Permaculture inspired homestead including a 1600 sq ft strawbale house. He moved to Brooklyn in 2007 and has been applying his knowledge to the urban landscape culminating in a Permaculture Design Certification course. He is developing The Center for Bioregional Living in Ellenville, NY with his partner Adriana Magana as a pilot campus for his students, clients and baby daughter Juniper. Andrew Faust has been practicing permaculture and biodynamics since receiving his Permaculture Design certificate in 1996. Faust has extensive experience in doing designs for a wide range of climates and habitats including desert, forest and mountain. He is a certified Alternative School Teacher, focusing on Bioregional Education; he instructed at Upattinas Open Community High School for ten years. Faust holds a B.A. in comparative religions from Guilford College.http://www.homebiome.com/ellenville.html

Dave Jacke

Dave is the main author of the seminal Edible Forest Gardens - a two-volume book on ecological garden design. The book has received multiple awards, including the American Horticultural Society Garden Book of the Year and ForeWord Magazine Home and Garden Gold Medal Book of the Year Award. Dave has been a student of ecology and design since the 1970s, and has run his own ecological design firm—Dynamics Ecological Design—since 1984. We filmed him at the Wellesley Permaculture Demonstration site, which he is designing as a research center - studying polycultures and plant chemistry.

Susana Kaye Lein

Susana is founder and manager of Salamander Springs Farm - a small, intensive farm producing a wide range of market crops, including grains & dry beans, without pesticides or chemical fertilizers of any kind and without mechanized tillage. The farm is inspired by no-till methods presented by Masanobu Fukoaka, and it is producing a great amount of staple food crops while continually building soil health. The farm is located in Berea, KY, where we did our filming. We also captured her selling produce at the Berea market.

Steve Gabriel

Steve is co-author of Farming the Woods with Ken Mudge. Along with wife Elizabeth, he runs Wellspring Forest Farm in the Finger Lakes Region of New York and advocates for agroforestry through the Cornell Small Farms Program. The farm is inspired by permaculture and agroforestry practices and seeks to support existing forests and re-forest the pasture while providing a range of products including mushrooms, maple syrup, duck eggs, grass-fed lamb, paw paw, and more. We filmed in Wellspring's one acre sugar maple forest.

Steve Whitman

Steve is a professional planner, permaculture teacher, and educator based in New Hampshire. He is a faculty member at Plymouth State University and teaches courses both in the US and internationally on permaculture design and community planning. He also collaborates with others as a planning consultant assisting municipalities and watersheds to build resilient communities through ecological design. He has converted his half acre suburban property into a thriving permaculture demonstration site focused on energy efficiency, habitat creation, and veganic food production. We filmed at his home in Plymouth, NH. http://resilienceplanning.net

Rhamis Kent

Rhamis is a consultant with formal training in mechanical engineering and permaculture-based regenerative whole systems design. He previously worked for the renowned American inventor and entrepreneur Dean Kamen at DEKA Research & Development, and more recently has worked with permaculturist Geoff Lawton on the development of Masdar City in UAE after Geoff and his consulting company (Permaculture Sustainable Consultancy) were contracted to identify solutions which fit the challenging zero emissions/carbon neutral design constraint of the project. Most recently, Rhamis collaborated with environmental filmmaker John D. Liu in the making of a documentary called "Green Gold," highlighting the topic of global ecosystem restoration work. We filmed with him in Burlington Vermont, before he flew back to his home in the UK. http://permaculturenews.org/2011/10/07/rhamis-kent-permaculture-in-somalia-ipc10-presentation-video/

Louis Sanchez

Louis is a student and resident of WaterFront South in Camden, NJ. He is an active member of the Camden Center for Transformation and gave us a tour of some of the regenerative water systems they have installed throughout the city. http://www.cfet.org

Charles Eisenstein

Charles is a teacher, speaker, and writer focusing on themes of civilization, consciousness, money, and human cultural evolution. He is author of The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible, Sacred Economics, and The Ascent of Humanity. Each of these books has gained critical acclaim and has marked Charles as a leading visionary for a new culture and economy. http://charleseisenstein.net

Ari Rosenberg

Ari helps run the Camden Center for Environmental Transformation (CFET) which is an urban farm and organization in Camden, NJ - a city that faces huge economic and social depression. They are using regenerative ecological systems such as waste stream catchment to restore food security and to transform degraded neighborhoods. We filmed in various garden locations around the waterfront neighborhoods, speaking with current managers, organizers, and residents.

Pandora Thomas

Pandora co-founded Earthseed Consulting LLC, a holistic consulting firm whose work expands the opportunities for sustainable living for diverse communities. Her current projects include the Black Permaculture Network, Pathways to Resilience-a permaculture and social entrepreneur training program for men returning home after incarceration, and working with Toyota to design and subsequently serving as a coalition member of the Toyota Green Initiative, which supports African Americans in understanding the benefits of adopting sustainable lifestyles.

Keith Morris has been applying his lifelong love of nature and culture and experience as an activist to permaculture and ecological design since 1996. Since 2000, he has worked professionally as a designer, builder, and grower of ecologically regenerative, socially just, and culturally appropriate whole-systems in cities and country sides around the world. He teaches at the University of Vermont, the Yestermorrow Design Build School, Sterling College, Paul Smiths College, Burlington Permaculture, and has worked for USAID ‘Farmer to Farmer’ in Nigeria and Ghana. We got to catch up with him at his farm http://prospectrockpermaculture.wordpress.com

Michael Phillips

Michael is the author of The Holistic Orchard: Growing Tree Fruits and Berries the Biological Way. He is using the power and strength of forest ecology to grow apples in a way that mimics natural succession, and he has spent 20 years debunking the belief that apples cannot survive without pesticides. We filmed him at his orchard/home in New Hampshire.